This only would work if you check every line of source code, even the dependencies and build chain, and then build it yourself. See xz utils backdoor or heartbleed, etc.
The whole point is that at some point somebody can check, and you can have a higher level of trust in that than proprietary software.
And if someone does something like this then it has to be disguised as an innocuous bug, like heartbleed, they can’t just install full on malware.
It’s a different beast entirely.
If we are talking about bigger projects with hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads, than this may be true. But smal scale projects have so few people actively looking through them that even to automatic scan done by the playstore has a higher chance of catching malware. It doesn’t even have to be bad intent, two years ago there was a virus propagating trough the Java class files in minecraft mods which reached the PCs of quite a few devs before it was caught.
I don’t dislike FOSS, a lot of the apps I use come straight from github, but all this talk about them beeing constantly monitored by third parties is just wishful thinking.
I’m not sure you’re understanding the argument: you cannot monitor closed source, therefore, you have at least as many eyes looking at my random crap on github as you do on the random crap some companies are doing.
Okay, but that’s a different claim than that you have to personally vet and compile every single thing you use, which is what I was responding to.
Open source isn’t perfect, but it is objectively and obviously better than closed.
The thing is we only know about these vulnerabilities in such great detail because the projects are open source. God knows what kund of vulnerabilities are hidden in closed source software.
Yes, but we don’t know what we don’t know. There are many problems like that in open source too, and even if we can look nobody does.
Therefore I find it problematic to say that just because you use open source programs you’re safe like the parent tried to.
Yes, important to keep in mind that software being open source doesn’t automagically make it secure™.
Still, I think it’s important to stress that the benefits of open source outweigh the risks when it comes to security (imho).
Yes, of course. However, when it’s open source, at least somebody is capable of checking those things, even if it is not you. Somebody in the community is capable of doing so.
Yes, that is true, but let’s not pretend that just because some one is theoretically able to, that all source code is constantly monitored by 3rd parties.
Oh, absolutely, that’s true. Definitely smaller projects have less audited code, and even bigger projects can have bugs. Heart bleed ring a bell, LOL. However, when open source software has a bug and it is discovered, it is fixed by somebody in record time, whereas in closed source software, you don’t know that there is a bug that can be exploited and it definitely won’t be fixed until it’s reverse engineered or something or exploited.
check every line … yourself.
🚩🚩🚩
A very classic lie, disinformation, used to spread anti-libre software. Anti-libre software bans us, not only me but everyone else, from removing malicious source code.
Very disingenuous of you to fight a strawman and proclaim victory by claiming that I said things which I never did. But if that’s what floats your boat. But for everyone else, try to find any mention of anti-libre software in the original claim.
If you download apps from fdroid, at the very least you can be sure that the binary is 100% generated from the provided source code, the devs can’t pull a switcheroo like submitting an altered version of app (e.g. inserting malware) that doesn’t match the published source code.
Exactly. Neckbeards love to pretend open source magically has no security vulnerabilities, and that the ability to inspect the source means you’ll never install anything nefarious.
I expect all of them to have read the source for every single package they’ve ever installed. Oh and the Linux source too, of course
